In telecommunication networks such as those based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specifications, to evaluate a quality of a communication channel, a reference signal is transmitted from a network device (which is also called as a base station) to a terminal device (which is also called as a user device or user equipment) according to a certain periodicity. The terminal device measures the quality of the channel based on the received reference signal and sends a measurement report to the network device. The report may also be generated and transmitted according to a periodicity configured by the network device. The periodicity for sending a reference signal by a network device may be referred to as a periodicity of reference signal transmission or simply a transmission periodicity. The periodicity for measuring the reference signal by the terminal device may be referred to a periodicity of reference signal measurement or simply a measurement periodicity.
Generally, in current 3GPP networks such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, a small period for transmitting the reference signal is configured (such as 1 ms) so that the terminal devices in the networks are able to receive that signal almost at any time they want. To reach an accuracy level, a terminal device may generate the report by considering the reference signal sent and received at different periodicity. Therefore, the period for the report may be larger than the period for transmitting the reference signal. For example, when the reference signal is sent according to a period of 1 ms, the terminal device may receive one sample of the reference signal at every 40 ms and use the 5 samples to generate a report. The measurement period of the report is thus 40*5=200 ms.
With massive growth of the numbers of devices and traffic volume, the fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems are being developed to build ultra-reliable connection for high frequencies and enable a networked society, where information can be accessed and data can be shared anywhere and anytime, by anyone with anything. In current standardization work of the 3GPP, New Radio (NR) techniques have been proposed. Some aims of the NR techniques are to increase (boost) the data rate, to save energy, and to decrease un-necessary interference as much as possible for both the network device and terminal device.
A requirement is therefore raised to increase the transmission periodicity of the reference signal (for example, to a level of 100 ms) so that resources and energies of the network device can be reserved for other processing (transmissions, receptions, and/or calculations). However, the increased transmission periodicity may cause some potential problems. On one hand, the measurement periodicity may be likewise increased and thus result in a long measurement period for the terminal device. For example, if 5 samples of the reference signal are needed to generate a report, the terminal device may have to wait for at least 500 ms. On the other hand, there is a tightened requirement on reliability or latency for many use cases of the terminal device where the increased measurement periodicity may be in-flexible or even un-acceptable.